>>25494692
>europe in between empires.jpg
This Europe, being in a state of incurable blindness, always ready to stab itself, finds itself today in the great tenacious, trapped between Russia on one side and America on the other. Russia and America, considered metaphysically, are the same thing; the same desolate fury of the unbridled technique and unfathomable organization of the vulgar man.
When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of "Being"] and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism — nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.
We are among the tenacious. Our people, being in the middle, suffering the greatest pressure of the tenacious, is the people with more neighbors and therefore more threatened, being thus the metaphysical people. But this determination, of which we are sure, can only be transformed into destiny when the people create a resonance in themselves, a possibility of resonance for that determination, understanding their tradition in a creative way. All this implies that this people as a historical people places itself and thus the history of the West out of the center of its future events, thus re-establishing itself in the realm of the powers of Being. Decision on Europe should not just be taken by way of destruction, it can only be taken by way of a development of new historical-spiritual forces from the center.
- Martin Heidegger, in "Introduction to Metaphysics", 1935